Fintech is a relatively new term that broadly defines a range of technologies used within the global financial services industry. A portmanteau of financial technology, the term refers to all manner of financially-related technologies. Increasingly, however, the term fintech is being used to describe those innovative technologies that are disrupting the industry and revolutionising traditional financial services.
Razi Salih has a strong background in the financial sector, with particular focus on establishing new technologies such as ecommerce payment solutions and blockchain. Fintech is more than simply the latest trend – as early as 2015, investment in fintech had increased to over $12 billion, up from around $930 million in 2008. Some more statistics about the fintech industry can be viewed in the infographic attachment to this post.
Streamlining Financial Services Processes
Fintech today is being utilised across a wide variety of industry sectors, but its initial and still fundamental purpose is the streamlining of processes within the financial services industry. Fintech is used in many ways to make systems and processes more efficient for both customers and businesses, improving the customer experience and freeing up employee time for other tasks. Blockchain is one of the most disruptive technological innovations of recent years, creating a system whereby digital transactions can be made securely without recourse to a central authority for verification.
Revolutionising Small Business
Fintech is not only streamlining systems and processes within the financial services industry. Today, fintech is revolutionising the way small businesses work. Access to capital now comes in many forms, thanks to technologies and platforms such as crowdfunding. With crowdfunding, small businesses can raise capital in a series of smaller increments from individuals and organisations across the world, bypassing the lengthy and often prohibitive systems of traditional banks and lenders.
Fintech is also making it easier and more affordable for small businesses to establish online payment systems, making things faster and more efficient for customers and cheaper and quicker for businesses to receive money.
Even farm stands and street stalls can today accept payments made by credit or debit card using a variety of secure online platforms, rather than relying on customers carrying cash. Not only that, but fintech is for the first time in history making it easy and relatively cheap to send and receive goods and payments internationally, using money transfer technology.
Fintech Start-Ups in the Money Transfer Market
One key area where fintech is making a huge impact is in the money transfer market. Multiple start-ups have been entering the market, each brining new and innovative ways of processing secure money transfers. This is revolutionising the foreign exchange markets as well as providing secure payment systems for retailers and facilitating the transfer of money to and from almost any currency in the world securely and instantaneously. The use of technology is simplifying processes across the board, without compromising data privacy or online security. The PDF attachment looks at some of the top fintech money transfer start-ups based in London today.
Changing Customer Behaviour
As technologies are changing, the expectations and behaviours of customers are changing along with them. Today’s consumer expects and demands to have almost everything at the touch of a button, often while out and about. Customers want to be able to use their smartphones to perform multiple tasks on a daily basis, ranging from doing their shopping to adjusting their investment portfolio. Fintech allows much of this to happen, thereby meeting customer demand even as that demand constantly shifts.
The short video attachment outlines some of the key benefits to the consumer of introducing bots into customer service.